Yelp draws mixed reviews from Southland business owners

Craig Martin, owner of Cafe 50’s in West Los Angeles, says some consumers are using Yelp as a weapon. He and other business owners are not exactly happy with the way the social media website works.
DAVID CRANE — LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

Yelp was designed as a user-friendly way for consumers to praise or critique restaurants, auto repair shops and just about any other kind of businesses you could imagine. But this online service has become a nightmare for some.
KEITH BIRMINGHAM — PASADENA STAR-NEWS

It’s immediate, it’s interactive and, if you own a business, it can quickly expand your audience.

Yelp was designed as a user-friendly way for consumers to find and praise or critique restaurants, auto repair shops, dentists and just about any other kind of businesses you could imagine.

In theory that’s a good thing because word of mouth is often the best way to gauge a business.

But this online service has become a nightmare for some. They say Yelp’s algorithm often buries positive reviews and promotes bad ones. And in an era when money is tight and consumers are picky, that could seriously hurt a business.

Craig Martin, owner of Cafe 50’s in West Los Angeles, said some people are using Yelp as a weapon.

“Yesterday at the restaurant we had a new cashier helping out,” he said. “A customer ordered chili for home delivery. But he thought she said Philly, like in Philly cheese steak. So that was what was sent to her. Well, she started screaming on the phone and yelling at me. She said, ‘I’m going to go on Yelp and tear you apart.’ Now people have this tool that they can threaten businesses with.”

Martin said his business has also received negative Yelp reviews from people who have never set foot in his restaurant.

“They just said they don’t like those types of restaurants,” he said. “When I asked Yelp about that, they said that it was freedom of speech. Look, the average restaurant has many items on their menu. But someone could eat there one time and not like that one dish and then say it’s the worst restaurant in America … I cringe.”

But the reviews on his business are all over the map, ranging from “a super cool joint with yummy burgers” to “food is atrocious and way too expensive.”

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So what’s a consumer to believe?

Morgan Remmers, Yelp’s manager of local business outreach, said people who turn to Yelp need to exercise some common sense.

“Consumers are looking at the bigger picture,” she said. “If one review says something that’s completely different or the opposite of what the rest say, they’ll have to look at all of the reviews and then make their own decision.”

Remmers also noted that businesses with very few reviews can easily be skewed by one or two bad ones. But Yelp’s automated review filter, she said, is designed to be as fair as possible.

“We launched the site in 2004, and early on we identified our first fake-looking review,” she said. “We realized there is a certain behavior pattern people have who create fake reviews and fake profiles. We have an automated software system that will detect that.”

The review filter works behind the scenes to analyze a wide range of data points about every review that’s written on Yelp in order to determine which reviews will be displayed on a given business page. Remmers said the filter applies the same set of rules for everyone, including advertisers and nonadvertisers.

“We intentionally make the filter difficult to reverse engineer — otherwise, we would be overrun by reviews written by people hoping to game the system,” she said. “So while it may be tough to decipher how the filter works, the rules are actually the same for every business and every review.”

“I’m not complaining about the idea of Yelp,” she said. “I think the idea of having people go online and say, ‘I really enjoyed this,’ or ‘I didn’t like that’ is fine. But it feels like negative reviews hang around longer.”

Not everyone is complaining.

Omar’s Pizzaria in Arcadia has had a good experience with the online rating site. Most of the eatery’s customer reviews give Omar’s a solid 5 out of 5 stars, and the shop’s overall rating is 4½ stars.

“The majority of my business is generated by Yelp,” owner Omar Ishaq said. “I don’t really do any advertising. It’s just the food.”

Still, Ishaq acknowledged that Yelp can be intimidating at times.

“I’m kind of afraid of Yelpers because they have so much power,” he said. “It’s a scary proposition. Someone might be having a rough day and you might be doing everything right from your end ... but then they’ll pick out one little thing. I had one review I lost sleep over. Right after we opened a guy came in and wrote that the service was great and the pizza crust was awesome — but there was no decor.”

Stephen Spiller, an assistant professor of marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, said Yelp could be used to help businesses correct problems that might be slowing their foot traffic.

“If businesses are monitoring Yelp, they should absolutely be able to learn,” he said. “There will always be a few bad apple customers who like to complain. But if there’s a pattern in those reviews, at some point a business owner needs to be able to say, ‘It’s not them, it’s me.’ It helps to identify the recurring problems that consumers care about.”

Remmers said some business owners print out their Yelp reviews — both good and bad — and then use them as a training tool to improve their operation.

And responding to a negative review doesn’t have to turn into a double negative, she said.

“If you respond to those reviews diplomatically by saying something like, ‘I’m really sorry because our pricing does seem a little high on this item,” you can sometimes turn a 1-star review into a 3-star review,” she said.

Other business owners fear that responding to a negative review will only elicit more bad publicity.

Remmers, who recently participated in a Yelp town hall meeting in Hollywood with area business owners, said the online service offers lots of features many business owners aren’t aware of.

“Yelp offers tons of free things for businesses,” she said. “They can upload photos, respond to reviews and you can add content that talks about what your business specializes in. You can tell the history of the business and include a bio of the business owner or general manager. You can also set up gift certificates.”

Remmers said 80 percent of the 42 million reviews on Yelp are 3 stars or higher.

Harold Ginsburg, who owns Art’s Delicatessen & Restaurant in Studio City, has his own thoughts on Yelp and similar social media websites.

“The Internet is like the Wild West,” he said. “But anything that gets our name and attention in front of someone is a good thing.”